There are numerous children and adolescents throughout the world who are either diagnosed with speech and language disorders or manifest any of them as a result of another disorder. Meanwhile, since the emergence of language as an innate capability, the question of whether it constitutes a behaviour or an innate ability has been debated for decades. There have been several theories developed that support and demonstrate the biological foundations of human language. Molecular evidence of the biological basis of language came from the FOXP2 gene, also known as the language gene. Taking a closer look at both human language and biology, biolinguistics is at the core of these inquiries-attempting to understand the aetiologies of the genetics of speech and language disorders in children and adolescents. This paper presents empirical evidence based on both scientometrics and bibliometrics. We collected data between 1935 and 2022 from Scopus, WOS, and Lens. A total of 1570 documents were analysed from Scopus, 1440 from the WOS, and 5275 from Lens. Bibliometric analysis was performed using Excel based on generated reports from these three databases. CiteSpace 5.8.R3 and VOSviewer 1.6.18 were used to conduct the scientometric analysis. Eight bibliometric and eight scientometric indicators were used to measure the development of the field of biolinguistics, including but not limited to the production size of knowledge, the most examined topics, and the most frequent concepts and variables. A major finding of our study is identifying the most examined topics in the genetics of speech and language disorders. These included: gestural communication, structural design, cultural evolution, neural network, language tools, human language faculty, evolutionary biology, molecular biology, and theoretical perspective on language evolution.

Do speakers of different languages think alike because of the universality of the experience of being human or do we all think differently because of differences in our languages? The answer to these questions has changed throughout the history of linguistic thought, ranging from observing languages merely as tools for expressing our thoughts to strongly believing that languages shape and even constrain our thoughts. This paper presents an overview of two most important theories that deal with these questions: the “rise and fall” of linguistic determinism (Whorfianism), and the development of its more cautious version – linguistic relativism (Neo-Whorfianism) – advocated today primarily within the framework of cognitive views of language, as well as their criticisms, most commonly within the framework of generative views of language.

The role of Universal Grammar (UG) in Second Language Acquisition (SLA) and its connection with neurolinguistics is explored by this study. The theory states that all humans have an innate capacity for language acquisition and are born with the natural ability to acquire language. However, its role in adult second language (L2) learning remains debated. Research indicates that while children rely on UG for language learning, adults depend more on memory and cognitive strategies. Neurolinguistic studies show that native speakers primarily use the left hemisphere for language processing, whereas adult L2 learners activate the right hemisphere, indicating different learning mechanisms. The Critical Period Hypothesis suggests that UG is accessible during early childhood but diminishes with age, making SLA more challenging for adults. Ullman’s Declarative-Procedural Model further explains that L1 learning is unconscious, while L2 learning is more explicit. Findings suggest that UG plays a key role in L1 acquisition but is less influential in SLA. Instead, cognitive mechanisms and explicit learning strategies become dominant.

Unsupervised Language Acquisition: Theory and Practice In this thesis I present various algorithms for the unsupervised machine learning of aspects of natural languages using a variety of statistical models. The scientific object of the work is to examine the validity of the so-called Argument from the Poverty of the Stimulus advanced in favour of the proposition that humans have language-specific innate knowledge. I start by examining an a priori argument based on Gold's theorem, that purports to prove that natural languages cannot be learned, and some formal issues related to the choice of statistical grammars rather than symbolic grammars. I present three novel algorithms for learning various parts of natural languages: first, an algorithm for the induction of syntactic categories from unlabelled text using distributional information, that can deal with ambiguous and rare words; secondly, a set of algorithms for learning morphological processes in a variety of languages, including languages such as Arabic with non-concatenative morphology; thirdly an algorithm for the unsupervised induction of a context-free grammar from tagged text.

about rationalism on the basis that his theory of innate grammar excludes propositional knowledge and instead focuses on innate learning capacities or structures Avram Noam Chomsky (born December 7, 1928) is an American intellectual, philosopher, linguist, political activist, and social critic. Sometimes called "the father of modern linguistics", Chomsky is also a major figure in analytic philosophy and one of the founders of the field of cognitive science. He is a laureate professor of linguistics at the University of Arizona and an institute professor em The basis of Chomsky's linguistic theory lies in biolinguistics, the linguistic school that holds that the principles underpinning the structure of language are biologically preset in the human mind and hence genetically inherited. He argues that all humans share the same underlying linguistic structure, irrespective of sociocultural differences. In adopting this position Chomsky rejects the radical behaviorist psychology of B. F. Skinner, who viewed speech, thought, and all behavior as a completely learned product of the interactions between organisms and their environments. Accordingly, Chomsky argues that language is a unique evolutionary development of the human species and distinguished from modes of communication used by any other animal species. Chomsky argues that his nativist, internalist view of language is consistent with the philosophical school of "rationalism" and contrasts with the anti-nativist, externalist view of language consistent with the philosophical school of "empiricism", which contends that all knowledge, including language, comes from external stimuli. Historians have disputed Chomsky's claim about rationalism on the basis that his theory of innate grammar excludes propositional knowledge and instead focuses on innate learning capacities or structures. Since the 1960s, Chomsky has maintained that syntactic knowledge is partially inborn, implying that children need only learn certain language-specific features of their native languages. He bases his argument on observations about human language acquisition and describes a "poverty of the stimulus": an enormous gap between the linguistic stimuli to which children are exposed and the rich linguistic competence they attain. For example, although children are exposed to only a very small and finite subset of the allowable syntactic variants within their first language, they somehow acquire the highly organized and systematic ability to understand and produce an infinite number of sentences, including ones that have never before been uttered, in that language. To explain this, Chomsky proposed that the primary linguistic data must be supplemented by an innate linguistic capacity.…

We encode the relevant aspects of universal grammar (UG)--those aspects of linguistic structure that are presumed innate and thus present in every linguistic system. The learning process consists of fixing a number of parameters which have been shown to underlie stress systems and which should, in principle, lead the learner to the postulation of the system from which the primary linguistic data (i.e., the input to the learner) is drawn. We go on to explore certain formal and substantive properties of this learning system. Questions such as cross-parameter dependencies, determinism, subsets, and incremental versus all-at-once learning are raised and discussed in the article. The issues raised by this study provide another perspective on the formal structure of stress systems and the learnability of parameter systems in general. Published in Cognition (1990)

Abstract Functional-cognitive linguists are typically more interested in what is shared between grammar and other aspects of language than in what is special about grammar. Construction grammar as the currently most prominent functional-cognitive theory of grammar explicitly downplays the grammar-lexicon distinction and suggests a model based on the notion of ‘constructicon’ as a unified inventory of linguistic expressions. In a neurocognitive perspective, this goes naturally with the idea of a single processing mechanism. Neurolinguistic evidence does not support this extreme position, however, but rather suggests a significant difference between lexical and grammatical processing. There is thus a need for a more well-developed functional-cognitive theory of the neurocognitive underpinning of the grammar-lexicon distinction. In this chapter we present a theory of the specific nature of grammar, which integrates three recent theories: a usage-based linguistic theory of the grammar-lexicon distinction ( Boye & Harder 2012 ), a theory of the distinction between declarative and procedural memory ( Ullman 2001 , 2004 ), and a theory of brain organization ( Mogensen 2011 ).

communication that consists of grammar and vocabulary. It is the primary means by which humans convey meaning, both in spoken and signed forms, and may Language is a structured system of communication that consists of grammar and vocabulary. It is the primary means by which humans convey meaning, both in spoken and signed forms, and may also be conveyed through writing. Human language is characterized by its cultural and historical diversity, with significant variations observed between cultures and across time. Human languages possess the proper In the…